


Bees Made Honey in the Lion's Head

by waldorph



Category: Sherlock (TV)
Genre: Episode Tag, Gen
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2010-11-23
Updated: 2010-11-23
Packaged: 2017-10-13 08:19:22
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,504
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/135141
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/waldorph/pseuds/waldorph
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Sherlock, after 'The Great Game'<br/></p>
            </blockquote>





	Bees Made Honey in the Lion's Head

**Author's Note:**

> My first actual Sherlock fic, set directly after 'The Great Game' and so obviously spoilers for all three episodes. Thanks to [screamlet](http://archiveofourown.org/users/SCREAMLET) for the beta, all remaining mistakes are my own, including Americanisms. Feel free to nitpick/concrit/britpick. Title from 'Samson & Delilah'.

He wakes up.

Imprecise language: he snaps back to consciousness. There is water everywhere, filthy and chlorinated and he does not understand, not until he is being wrenched out, not until he sees John’s mouth forming words over his.

John tackled him into the pool. Sherlock has been shot.

Facts.

He loses consciousness. Inevitable, with the amount of blood loss and internal bruising sustained.

* * *

Mycroft is sitting beside his face. Two pounds heavier, lower lip slick with grease. Mycroft always did stress-eat. It’s been a long time since Sherlock remembered he could be a cause of Mycroft’s genuine stress.

Looks at the offered phone and reads the text meant for Sherlock sent to Mycroft: _He did say worries about you constantly._ At the time it had been inconceivable that it might be true, shades of grey: Mycroft appealing to John’s better nature. Now it’s John manipulating Mycroft.

Sherlock doesn’t quite smile. Clever.

IV in his arm, narcotics slowing his thought processes. Pain, distant, hovering above him somewhere. There, but untouchable.

“Where is he?” he says, or thinks he has, but Mycroft only shifts and looks impatient, leaning forward and a nurse appears comes into view and this medical evaluation is _boring_ and so Sherlock sleeps again.

* * *

“No, I haven’t any idea where he is.” Lying, Mycroft is lying.

“He checked himself out and didn’t go home,” Lestrade replies, as though Mycroft would not know this all, and know it long before Lestrade. So stupid, why are people so infernally stupid?

Sherlock wants to say that of course John didn’t go home. This is a war one cannot be sent home from, and John Watson never thrives so much as when he is in the throes of battle. Would not stand to be wrenched from the battlefield a second time.

Moriarty will not leave: Sherlock is here. Sherlock is here, and Moriarty will stay, and so Mycroft is here.

Pointless.

Lestrade’s footsteps are thwarted as he leaves the room. Silence for one, two, three beats, and then, predictable as the progression of denial to admission in a criminal caught red-handed: “I know you’re quite awake.”

“I’m bored.”

“Yes, well. How are your ribs?”

“Impossible to detect through the medication, obviously.”

He smiles, infinitely patronizing. Irritating.

“You needn’t stay.” Sherlock longs for something to occupy him. Even just a violin.

“I have every reason to do so.”

“You can barely hit the broadside of a barn.”

“There are other ways to kill a man.”  
Sherlock’s lips twist: they both know Jim Moriarty will die looking down the barrel of a British Army Browning L9A1.

Wrong verb. Not know. Hope.

The alternative is that John Watson dies with his hand still clenched around that illegal gun.

* * *

Mycroft says, “He was shot in the thigh, and had shrapnel in his shoulder.”

Sherlock understands how John could leave, then. Psychosomatic or not, he’s been dealing with those pains for a year.

Sherlock had seven fractures in three ribs, and a partially collapsed lung.

He relearns how to breathe around them, circles his hands around the bruises on opposing wrists and remembers being absolutely shocked when he hit the water before the explosion hit.

He’d meant to die, take them both with him, but then it would be _over_. Ended.

“Oh, you are an idiot,” Mycroft observes, pitying, and Sherlock flips him off. Crude, yet effective.

“That girl down at the morgue. Molly,” Mycroft says. “They found her body.”

Needless death: Moriarty needn’t have done. And a pity, he’d had her nicely broken in, could get take what he wanted for the slightest bit of attention. He’ll have to start all over again.

“Do try to exhibit some compassion,” Mycroft chides.

Sherlock slants him a look, and then decides sleep is the best form of defence from the insipidity of this conversation.

* * *

He has physical therapy.

It is abominable.

He sleeps fifteen hours a day, and feels absolutely useless.

He has nothing to do. _Bored_.

He steals Maggie’s blackberry and solves sixteen cases, insults Anderson and tells John not to be an idiot.

 _Her name is really Maggie_ he texts John.

Maggie-not-Anthea glares at him, and Mycroft chuckles at him indulgently.

It would be very easy to take his own IV and plunge the needle into Mycroft’s arm and press down on the bag. Bubbles in the bloodstream: nasty way to die.

“Fratricide is an ugly thing,” Mycroft informs him.

“Mummy might thank me, saving her the shame of an obese child,” Sherlock replies, and it is petty and beneath his usual form but it never fails to be a direct hit, the ripple of disgust and insecurity over Mycroft’s face will never not be satisfying.

* * *

Jim Moriarty walks into Sherlock’s private room with a wide smile, comfortably back in his gay IT tech persona.

“Hi,” he sing-songs. “Big brother gone and left you all alone? Don’t worry, I’ll take good care of you.” His voice goes flat, hard with intent.

Sherlock watches John lift his arm and aim, watches Moriarty fall at his feet, glass in the door shattered.

Moriarty stares at the hole in his chest. “No. He-- _you_ were supposed to kill me,” he says. He was right. His face does make that surprised expression, mouth turned into a nearly perfect ‘O’. Fascinating.

Sherlock presses his palms and fingertips together under his chin and watches Moriarty sink down, face contorting until it smooths out.

People are running, staff and police swarming, and Sherlock is disappointed when they take the body, mostly because Molly is gone. He might have liked to keep Moriarty’s skull to replace the one Mrs. Hudson threw out.

* * *

“Who am I looking for, then? A military man with nerves of steel again?” Lestrade asks. He seems to want Sherlock to contradict him.

So Sherlock obliges. “Hardly.”

He tells Lestrade about the obvious signs that this was vengeance, a cold-blooded killer with no compassion who had been crossed. Points out that soldiers operate best in packs or under cover. And then, archly, that a doctor would hardly instigate a shoot-out in a hospital. Lestrade makes noises about how he never suspected John, Sherlock, honestly. And then, in complete contradiction: “If I find the gun--” and Sherlock waves a hand, bored.

He won’t.

* * *

John picks him up at the hospital, bracing against the cane and his shoulder ignored. He is implacable and Sherlock endures the wheelchair in order to achieve freedom, hands wrapped around a garishly decorated box with a bright red bow atop it. From Mycroft, he supposes, though perhaps not. Difficult to say, which is intriguing.

He opens it in the cab, and traces his finger along Jim Moriarty’s eye socket.

“Mrs. Hudson threw yours out,” John says, watching London go by.

“How was Harry?” Sherlock replies. John twists his lips into a reasonable facsimile of a smile: she was drunk, then, in the little time he actually spent with her.

“Harry was Harry,” John says, and Sherlock doesn’t call him on the tautology.

Mrs. Hudson clucks at Sherlock when she sees the skull but she’s too busy fixing them both tea and reprimanding John for not using his cane and beaming at them both for living that she won’t throw it out.

* * *

“You are a bad influence,” Mycroft says.

Sherlock replies, “You know his service record.”

John Watson is not an angel. He is a soldier, and a doctor, and Moriarty was a cancer spreading through London. John was swift and effective, and now Sherlock and he will clean up Moriarty’s mess.

John cares so much for humanity, and Jim Moriarty had revoked his own membership, and so John had killed him.

Sherlock wonders what will keep him from becoming cancerous in John’s eyes. If there will be a day he watches John pull a trigger and find that the bullet lodges itself in his heart.

“Oh, don’t be melodramatic,” Mycroft dismisses.

* * *

John ignores seventeen texts and fourteen calls from Harry demanding to know where he got to. He finally answers that he had to pick Sherlock up from the hospital. Sherlock could not have designed a better alibi.

The answer to the question of how Mycroft was coaxed out of the room is answered the night John comes back to the flat smelling vaguely of Maggie’s perfume, holding Sherlock’s crop.

* * *

John says, “Do you mind that it wasn’t you?”

Sherlock considers it. He would have liked the chase: would have enjoyed the challenge, would have liked to prove his superiority by shooting Moriarty in the head. It would have been entertaining, but so has this been: watching John be so very innocuous and slide quietly under everyone’s radar commit a second act of homicide.

He says instead, “Will it be, someday?”

And John shrugs off his jacket and sits in his chair, turning on the television and then drawing a face: medical show, then. “Up to you, isn’t it?”

Sherlock smiles. “I’ve decided being the villain is boring, anyway.”

“True, and you’re just not camp enough,” John agrees, and flips the channel.


End file.
